Hannibal Lecter doesn't deal in easy death. His victims tend to suffer horribly - they're mutilated while still alive, as was made clear during last week's slideshow of the Ripper's victims - and nothing about what he does could be called merciful. Death for its own sake doesn't seem to interest him. So it shouldn't be surprising that, faced with someone who truly welcomes death, he withholds it.

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This feels to me like the cruellest thing we've seen Hannibal do, which is a weird thing to say after an episode that also shows him inducing Will's seizures and blackouts last season (just in case the gaslighting and framing and ear force-feeding wasn't enough). He gave Bella every reason to believe that he understood her, felt for her, and would allow her the peaceful death she needed.

He let her feel every one of those final moments of relief, and then he dragged her back to her horrifying existence, where she'll now probably be in even more pain than before after trashing her liver with that morphine overdose. Bella's wrong, of course, when she says that her social circle doesn't include a friend with power over death, but Hannibal isn't playing God in a straightforward way - he wants control, and to rule, and to inflict pain. The way Gina Torres delivers that "No..." when she regain consciousness was as haunting as anything the show has done.

But what Hannibal did to Bella was also a pragmatic move, in the sense that Jack will now be more disposed than ever to believe the best of Hannibal; he's now the man who saved Jack's wife, and gave him back the goodbye that Bella tried to deny him.

The groundwork for Bella's heartbreaking storyline was laid by the murderer du jour, which ranks up there with last season's human mushroom garden for sheer, uncanny chill factor. Amanda Plummer's eerily serene acupuncturist believed she was "protecting" her hopeless victims; turning one man into a human beehive and another into the walking dead was her version of euthanasia.

But the very primal horror of a lobotomy ties more obviously back into the revelations Will had about just how extensively Hannibal was manipulating his brain. The recreation of the "Please don't lie to me" seizure scene was brilliant, because I for one had completely forgotten that Will had technically witnessed Hannibal confessing to being the Chesapeake Ripper ("Terrible thing, to have your identity taken from you").

Both the revelations about Hannibal and the conclusion of Bella's arc evoke the primal fear that lies at the heart of Hannibal as a series: the fear that those who claim to care for us, our friends and our family and our doctors, are actually hurting us. There's a reason why so many psychotic patients present the delusion that they're being poisoned, or controlled, or tricked.

And it's sort of sad that in order to recover this memory of persecution, Will had to allow Chilton (of all scumbags) free rein to inject him with yet more drugs. Hugh Dancy must be absolutely physically exhausted after filming this show - it's such a demanding, wrung-out performance, even in weeks where he's not being asked to yank his eyeballs around at seizure-speed.

But Will's gradually getting stronger. Before, he was fishing alone in his head - now Abigail is with him, talking him through his strategies for hunting Hannibal, "the one who got away". So far, Will has opted for luring rather than stalking, reeling Hannibal in with his seeming vulnerability; his goal is to catch, not to shoot. After what's about to happen to Beverly, though, I suspect he may have to abandon the softly-softly approach.

Oh, Beverly. What are you doing? Never go to the suspected serial killer's house just because you think he's out, and definitely never go down to his basement alone! Mads Mikkelsen and Bryan Fuller have spoken a lot about their vision of Hannibal as the devil incarnate, and he really feels like an otherworldly spectre here. Over and over again in this episode we see Hannibal distorted: through Will's eyes as he seizes, through Bella's as she fades, and from Beverly as she turns, doomed.

Food for thought:
- Did Bev see something besides Hannibal's reflection in the basement? When she says "Oh my God", it seemed to be before she saw him. If so, is it a corpse? A living victim being kept prisoner? The human meat equivalent of a butcher's shop window?
- If the coin had landed on the other side, would Hannibal really have let Bella die? Given that he's being investigated and he needs to keep Jack firmly on his side, her dying from an overdose in his office would not have been great.
- Fantastic reaction faces from Jack, Zeller and Price as Amanda Plummer gave her smiley, willing confession.
- But the prize for the episode's best reaction has to go to Hugh Dancy, for the moment when Will realised the full implication of the idea that Hannibal eats his trophies. Excellent "I'm very much certain that I'm going to vomit" acting. That sausage.
- What is Chilton's angle? He's such a difficult character to read, and mostly I think he's just out for himself, but he seemed a bit genuinely disturbed by the idea that Hannibal had been psychic driving Will all along. Nice reference back to his dinner with Hannibal and Alana in 'Entrée'.
- "Ohhhh, you are harshing my buzz right now." Ha! Jack is growing on me this season.
- This does not make up for Bev's death, but it was nice that she got to have a bona fide light bulb moment of her own with the stitches hiding stitches, rather than just parroting Will's genius all the time.
- The eye theme continues, following the mural: Will's eyes are seen in extreme close-up again and again as people come and go, as his pupils dilate, as he seizes. And then, of course, the ice pick lobotomy. Gah.